Technology

Shave and a Haircut!

It's finally here. After over 6 months, we are ecstatic to finally present to you the new style we will be using for our character portraits!

These new portraits are painted and have much more detail than our previous manga-style portraits. When we changed the graphics of our game from 2D pixel art to 3D, we found that our old portraits looked out of place. After experimenting with a number of different styles, we decided to go with more realistic-looking characters.

The evolution of Mark.

Many of the primary characters will have multiple facial expressions that will change depending on the dialogue. So far, the main character has 12 emotions, but we estimate he'll have at least a dozen more by the final version.

Our previous dialogue system only allowed for conversations between 2 people. The current build allows for up to 7 people to participate in a dialogue scene. The player will also be able to make up to 6 dialogue choices, many of which will be influenced by certain stats the player has. We'll be expanding on this much more in future blog posts!

On the overworld side of things, we've mainly been working on constructing the indoor environments of some of the bigger buildings. One such building is a massive hospital that will serve as a hub for several side quests. The hospital was definitely a challenge to build since it's dozens of times larger than any indoor environment we've made so far. It was also difficult to balance making the areas look nice while being easy to navigate through.

Creating the ground textures proved to be a lot more challenging than we anticipated because what we had in our head did not blend well with the rest of the environment when we actually implemented it.

We have the inventory system mostly worked out. After testing the latest build, we discovered that the loading time for the inventory system was quite a bit higher than what we wanted it to be, so there is some more optimization that needs to happen. After the inventory system is complete, we'll finish work on the menu system and show you how all the new systems tie in with each other.